(This is a chapter excerpt of
Kirkpatrick Sale's Rebels Against The Future: The Luddites and their
War on the Industrial Revolution)

The steam engine, especially as it was perfected
by the Watt and Boulton shop in the experimental years after 1776, was the
iron heart of the Industrial Revolution. No matter that it was surrounded
by thousands of other ingenious machines and inventions, some more
immediately practical--294 patents were issued in Britain in the 1770s,
477 in the 1780s, and 647 in the 1790s, almost twice as many as in the
preceding hundred years of patenting--it was the first manufacturing
technology in human history that was, in a sense, independent of
nature, of geography and season and weather, of sun or wind or water or
human or animal power. It allowed humans for the first time, restricted
only by available supplies of coal (and metal), to have a constant,
unfailing source of power at their command, capable of producing an almost
infinite variety of objects with a minimum of personal effort or time. And
thus it permitted the extraordinary shift from what had been an organic
economy based on land and labor and local exchange to a mechanical economy
based on fuel and factory and foreign trade, an empowerment of the machine
in human society such as had never before been attempted.

All technologies have
consequences, inevitable and built in, and imperatives, just as
inevitable, essentially separate from human dictates and desires. Norbert
Wiener, the mathematician who was the founder of modern cybernetics, has
written about "technical determinants" dictated by "the
very nature" of machines, and of the steam engine he noted that it
automatically leads to large and ever larger scales because it can power
so many separate machines at once, to ever increasing production because
it must pay back its high investment and operating costs, and to
centralization and specialization because factors of efficiency and
economy supersede those of, say, craftsmanship or esthetic expression. He
might have added that it also necessarily leads to a reduction in
face-to-face contacts, social discourse, human autonomy, individual
choice, and personal skills, none of which is especially important as far
as the operation of the machine goes.

There is, then, a kind of
technological logic connected to this iron monster with a pulse of
steam"--what Clark Kerr and his team in the 1960s called "the
logic of industrialism," which they say is why all industrial
societies look pretty much alike--and by extension of course to the other
machinery of the Industrial Revolution. It did not take more than a few
decades for contemporaries to start observing where it led: large-scale
units of production governed by regimentation and control, increasing
refinement and complexity of machinery, a division of labor and hence of
training and hence of social status, expanding markets, expanding
resources, expanding wastes--all phenomena that the Kerr investigators
found wherever they followed industrialism a century and a half later. It
also led, and leads, though Kerr lays less emphasis here, to social and
political consequences: the squeezing of farm populations and the
uncontrollable growth of cities, the evisceration of self-reliant
communities, the enlargement of central governments, the enthronement of
science as ruling ideology, a wide and increasing gap between rich and
poor, and ruling values of profit, growth, property, and consumption. It
was so in the early 19th century of Britain, the late19th century of the
United States, the 20th century of Japan, and seems indeed to be so in the
process of industrialism everywhere.

That may seem like a lot of
weight to load on Watt's simple machine--a restatement in metal, by the
way, of a device known to the Greeks two thousand years before*--but
contemporaries who lived within the sound of its roar had no doubts.
"One of the most striking revolutions ever produced in the moral and
social conditions of a moiety of a great nation," said Peter Gaskell
in his survey of The Manufacturing Population in EngLand in 1833,
"is that which has been consequent to the application of steam to
machinery." By then steam power was doing what Gaskell calculated to
be the work of 2.5 million people-and since the 1831 census had identified
no more than 3 million people engaged in manufacturing overall, that meant
steam machinery was nearly equivalent to the whole manufacturing
workforce, just four decades after its introduction. Indeed, Gaskell
warned, "vast and incessant improvements in mechanical contrivances,
all tending to overmatch and supersede human labour [threaten] ere long to
extirpate the very demand for it," making the English worker, except
for those making the machines, obsolete.

Steam made its impact primarily
in the textile industries, most of them traditionally located in that
Luddite triangle where streams running from the Pennine hills had long
provided the water needed to wash and prepare yarn and the weather systems
in from the Irish Sea had long provided the damp climate suit-able to its
processing into cloth. When the first factories appeared they used the
Pennine streams for power, but since this source was so uncertain--many
mills were idle in the summer months when the streams dwindled to
trickles--the attraction of the steam engine and its ceaseless energy was
irresistible, especially since by a whim of Albion the region was replete
with coalfields to fire the steam. By 1800, a little more than a decade
after their introduction into the factory, some 2,191 steam engines were
thought to be at work in Britain--those "Stygian forges, with their
fire-throats and never-resting sledge-hammers" that Carlyle wrote
of--some 460 of them in the textile trades and responsible for as much as
a quarter of all cotton production. By 1813 there were an estimated 2,400
textile looms operating by steam, but that burgeoned to 14,150 by 1820 and
exploded to more than 100,000 just a decade later, as factory production
came to dominate cotton and moved steadily into wool, silk, and other
branches. By then, according to a contemporary expert, one man could do
the work that two or three hundred men had done at the start of the
Industrial Revolution, "the most striking example of the dominion
obtained by human science over the powers of nature, of which modern times
can boast."

Although large industrial
organizations had been known for some time--the famous arsenal in
16th-century Venice was in most respects a factory, right down to division
of labor and mass production~it was the Industrial Revolution, driven by
the steam engine, that produced the first factory system--an
operation both immense and intense, in which not only the machine but the
entire production process, humans included, was made up of more or less
isolated and interchangeable parts. Very shortly it took this shape, as a
German visitor wrote from Manchester in 1823:

The modern miracles, my friend,
are to me the machines here and the buildings that house them, called
factories. Such a block is eight or nine stories high, sometimes has 40
windows along its frontage and is often four windows deep. Each floor is
twelve feet high, and vaulted along its whole length with arches each
having a span of nine feet. The pillars are of iron, as is the girder
which they support. . . . A hundred of them are now standing unshaken
and exactly as they were erected thirty and forty years ago. A number of
such blocks stand in very elevated positions which dominate the
neighbourhood; and in addition a forest of even taller boiler-house
chimneys like needles, so that it is hard to imagine how they remain
upright; the whole presents from a distance a wonderful spectacle
especially at night, when thousands of windows are brilliantly
illuminated by gaslight.

The human appendages to the
machines thus housed were leaden drudges. A Leeds doctor said in 1831:

While the engine works, the
people must work. Men, women, and children are thus yoke-fellows with
iron and steam; the animal machine--fragile at best, subject to a
thousand sources of suffering, and doomed, by nature in its best state,
to a short-lived existence, changing every moment, and hastening to
decay--is matched with an iron machine insensible to suffering and
fatigue.

This is the factory system, these
two machines working together in "a vast automaton," in the
words of the great apologist for it, Andrew Ure, in 1835, "composed
of various mechanical and intellectual organs, acting in an uninterrupted
concert for the production of a common object, all of them being
subordinated to a self-regulating moving force."

"Subordinated" is the
key word here, though Ure seems to feel there is no distinction to be made
between the mechanical and intellectual kind. The task for the factory
owner was to make sure that workers would be disciplined to serve the
needs of the machines-"in training human beings," Ure said,
"to renounce their desultory habits of work and to identify with the
unvarying regularity of the complex automaton"-and for this the
principal strategies were threefold. First, long and inflexible hours,
behind locked doors, twelve and fourteen hours a day being the rule for
the first several decades, sometimes as many as sixteen or eighteen, and
never less than ten; next, a regimen of shop-floor penalties, such as
these (out of a list of nineteen) posted in a cotton mill in 1824--

Any spinner found with his window open
1 shilling

Any spinner found dirty at his work
1 shilling

Any spinner heard whistling
1 shilling

Any spinner being five minutes after the last
bell rings 2
shillings

--and assessed on wages that
averaged no more than 24 shillings a week; and finally by outright
physical force, more commonly used against women and children but
available to all, typified by the foreman "kept on purpose to
strap," whose job was continually walking up and down with the strap
in his hand," as a Parliamentary inquiry was told in 1833, beating
children "late at their work" in the morning or falling asleep
at their work in the afternoon--"very cruel strapping," too, and
"some have been beaten so violently that they have lost their lives
in consequence.

But there was another, wider
discipline of the labor force as well: by government policy, sanctioned
somehow by laissez-faire ideology, the workers of Britain were made
effectively powerless to resist the demands of their employers. Laws
passed in 1799 and 1800 that consolidated long-standing antiunion statutes
made it illegal to organize, or "combine," to try to get higher
wages or shorter hours or better conditions, even to raise funds or attend
meetings as a unit; and though certain trades in certain towns could evade
some of these restrictions, many employers made full use of the laws (or
threat of them) whenever they felt resistance mounting among their
workers. Government policies also helped expand the labor pool, especially
during the first decades of industrialism (largely by facilitating the
immigration of Irish laborers and forcing agricultural workers from the
countryside), which worked as it always does to undercut any functional
bargaining power of the workers. This was compounded by the fact that
there were no restrictions on employing women and children, starting at
ages as young as 4 and 5, who came to make up roughly four fifths of the
textile labor force by 1833, a population both easier to exploit and
cheaper to hire than adult men. Taken together, all this served quite well
to make the workers, particularly in the large manufacturing towns where
numbers were greater and owners more powerful, for the most part
effectually "subordinated" to the larger interests of the new
industrialism.

Thus did the "logic of
industrialism" work, following out the imposition of its technology
with a sweep and power that transformed lives and landscapes within just a
few decades to a degree never seen, not even imaginable, before The steam
engine was, as Andrew Ure boasted, "the controller general and
mainspring of British industry, which urges it onwards at a steady rate,
and never suffers it to lag or loiter, till its appointed task be
done."

* Hero of Alexandria designed,
and probably built, a steam engine in the first century B.C. that used
fire-heated cauldrons and tubes. The Mediterranean world of the time,
however, had all the labor power it needed in slaves, and Hero's machine
was ignored; in an England of the 18th century where slaves were outlawed
and cheap labor hard to control and manipulate, great energy was put into
creating just such a device.